It's a start. At least now the desktop doesn't make a difference, only your servers. Something platform independent like Ruby or PHP would be more useful in the long run, but baby steps are at least steps.

Because computers are 'scary' and 'magical' things, and work by smoke. That and the user interface isn't an inherently intuitive one in a lot of applications (particularly legacy business ones). I suspect that's one of the reasons why the iPad is getting such good feedback from 'not computer people', because you interface with it in a more intuitive way.

The ball isn't any more or less intuitive than why a picture of a floppy disk saves your document. It made sense once, but who uses floppies for saving documents nowadays? It's just become commonplace, much like "Exit" being under the "File" menu. Exiting the application has got absolutely nothing to do with the file.

That's why when you ran Office 2007 for the first time there was a huge bubble saying "This is the new Office Button. It has things like Save and Print in it."

So that in a few years people don't arrive having never used XP and immediately start cursing at "this stupid system". Little things like the improved taskbar, the window snap and so on all work their way into how you interact and you suddenly feel lost without them.

Software isn't the problem, people who use 7 at home and don't want to go back to XP at work are.

That and the fact Vista and 7 don't support IE6. If the OS can't support it, IE6 is dead.

Ask yourself what stops people from opening ballot boxes to mess with the votes? The answer (in the UK at least) is four uniquely serial-numbered ties which have their numbers noted when the box is sent out, and verified when it's opened. Just put all the innards in an epoxy resin, put them in a toughened metal cabinet, lock the door with a key and attach aforementioned ties. A screwdriver won't help you.

Unless you happen to be a scientist in a related field, raw data tends to be next to useless. Anybody can draw pretty graphs in Excel and get worried about a rising trend line, declining trend line or anomalous result but it takes someone who knows what they're talking about to explain what they actually mean.

You know the multi-billion dollar LHC? Guess what they did their first physics on. Not finding new exotic particles, but proving that what we think we know so far still stands up. Duplicating data is exactly how things get proven and disproven. If Group A and Group B use exactly the same source data there's no possibility of Group B proving Group A's research wrong.

I wish I had a dollar for every time an OSS project spat out something like "ERROR: 0947445" with no mention anywhere of what aforementioned error code meant or how to fix it, then upon further dredging through a hundred uncommented lines of code to find out what was going on it turns out that the root cause was that I hadn't installed some-package-to-do-something-2.4-beta (which should have been a prerequisite, but isn't).